Why Was Hollywood So Slow to Capitalize on the Action Film?

The original, EON-produced James Bond movies of the early 1960s are generally regarded as the starting point for the modern action film--the movies that established their characteristic filmic structure, its range and density of set pieces, and its cinematographic and editorial techniques (and even the "blockbuster" mode of releasing them). Yet, Hollywood seems to have only properly begun to assimilate this practice in the mid-1970s, while it seems that it was another decade before they really became a staple product for the industry. In other words, a full generation seems to have passed between those foundational Bond films, and the rise of the Hollywood action film. Just why was that?

One might imagine that such a question had already been asked and answered numerous times, but so far as I can tell, this is very far from being the case. One reason, I suppose, is that the sorts of serious, rigorous scholars of film who would do the hard work of tracing the development have little time for action-oriented blockbusters, whose rise many of them even seem to regard as an annoying aberration, or even a disaster for film. Another would seem to be the extent to which action films are defined by form rather than the kind of content to which they prefer to devote their analytical energies, in part because it is easier to talk about themes than it is the subtleties of cinematic technique--while the fact that the form is of a kind they do not respect does not encourage them in such efforts.

The question is a tough one, too, because it raises the question of why something was not done, a necessarily trickier matter than explaining why something was. Still, the well-known history of Hollywood, and the Bond films, offers a possible explanation.

When the early Bond films came along they were thrillers tinged with science fiction--at a time when thrillers and science fiction were both B-movie stuff, and B-movies looked like they were dying. It might be added, too, that spy films were a relative exoticism for American culture--a genre rather less well-established than, for example, hard-boiled crime. A survey of the reviews written about the films at the time also makes it clear that observers were not so sure about what to make of them--not so sure that they were looking at the rise of a new kind of film. Rather it seemed to them that they were looking at merely a parody of existing material--a parody of Hitchcock, a parody of science fiction, with such a view the more understandable because of the illogic and self-parody that was part of the warp and woof of those movies from the start.

None of this stopped Hollywood from imitating the Bond films. Yet, the imitation was for the most part superficial, and lightweight. The movies imitated the theme of the globe-trotting, gadget-packing superspy, for the most part parodically, rather than displaying a real grasp of the action movie mechanics, because the former was all that could be done with the slight understanding of or interest in those movies. The superficial, parodic route was also much less expensive. After all, in less than half a decade the Bond films upped their budgets tenfold, You Only Live Twice running a hefty near $10 million--and it would have cost Hollywood far more to make such a production at home. It is safe to assume that this was rather more than it was ready to risk in trying to compete head to head with the Bond brand by making a glorified B-movie with the kind of A-movie budget they were used to spending on other, very different kinds of film.* Finally, the reality is that in the mid-1960s the Bond films were already passing the peak of their popularity, and by the 1970s looking increasingly repetitive, derivative of other material and outright decadent, lessening the interest in the movies and what they may have had to offer (that still unmastered action movie form), turning attention from them toward other directions.

And even before that point there were two other trends that galvanized Hollywood's attention, one more natural given its history, the other more radical. The first was an extension of the turn to splashy musicals evident in the '50s, with the years of Bond's greatest successes in America overshadowed each year by a hugely successful film of the type. In 1964 Goldfinger was #2 at the American box office, and From Russia With Love #5, but My Fair Lady was #1. In 1965 Thunderball proved the series' biggest ever success, but wound up at only #3, overshadowed by, above all, the biggest box office phenomenon of the whole decade--The Sound of Music, which took in twice as much in America and globally. In the next several years Hollywood sunk much of its money into trying to repeat that success, and never quite accomplishing it, Camelot doing all right, Oliver! better than all right, but 1969's Sweet Charity, Hello, Dolly! and Paint Your Wagon a trio of big-budget ($20 million) letdowns that largely ended the trend.

The other trend was, of course, the "New Hollywood." Pioneered by directors less habituated to Hollywood tradition, they had relatively little interest in the kind of movie the Bond films represented. Their sensibility, after all, was oriented toward the arthouse, toward youth and the counterculture, toward social criticism and urban grit, toward aesthetically and politically edgier fare, rather than Bond-style crowd pleasers, even if, eventually, it was a New Hollywood director who brought the action film to Hollywood--George Lucas, in Star Wars, for which the Bond films had been an influence.

At that point Hollywood repeated the pattern of superficial imitativeness with Star Wars, imitating the space theme more than grasping the mechanics of action moviemaking, such that the Alien and Star Trek franchises did not began as action movie series', and only became such over the course of the '80s. The original Star Wars trilogy ran its course in 1983, and by then the larger fashion for space operatic movies was waning (few such appearing until the mid-'90s), but by then Hollywood had had the chance to pick up the pattern, routinize it in a period when it might have been more open, because it was more prepared to learn from its own successes than those of others, because B-movies were becoming the new A-movies, because "high concept" had become king and even if it was not yet closely identified with action-adventure, Lucas and his cohorts had given the studio heads the strongest foundation for high concept success of all.

* The 1967 Casino Royale wound up pricier than any Bond movie made to date with a $12 million budget, but this was the result of a chaotic production process that led to cost overruns; and in any event, that film very much an exception.